Paramount Licenses Controversial Copyright Protection Technology.

Paramount Home Entertainment on Wednesday became the second major Hollywood studio to license rather controversial BD+ copyright protection technology after Twentieth Century Fox. In addition, Paramount Home Entertainment has agreed to license other Macrovision’s content protection products, ACP and RipGuard.

“We are pleased to continue our long-standing relationship with Macrovision to preserve Paramount Home Entertainment’s high-quality products. Macrovision’s technologies cover a variety of distribution channels, providing necessary safeguards which benefit both the studio and the consumer,” said Kelley Avery, Worldwide President of Paramount Home Entertainment.

ACP and RipGuard provide protection against unauthorized copying of content across packaged media, such as DVD and Blu-ray, as well as electronic channels such as the Internet, cable and DBS.

BD+ is the latest copyright protection layer for Blu-ray discs that compliments AACS, HDCP and so on. BD+ is a small program recorded on a Blu-ray disc that is executed by player and examines whether the players security keys were changed as well as decodes part of the content encrypted with BD+ keys. The BD+ technology was finalized in June, 2007, therefore, all players released before that date need to be re-flashed with a new firmware. In the past some discs from Twentieth Century Fox did not playback on certain players before re-flash.

“As Macrovision continues to add valuable content protection technologies to their suite of solutions, it provides Paramount with valuable methods to protect our content when distributed on DVD and Blu-ray media,” said Chris Carey, executive vice president of worldwide technical operations at Paramount Pictures.

The agreement is for a multi-year term and financial terms were not disclosed.

Discussion

BD+ was cracked over a year ago.
Ripguard has been cracked since at least 2005.
ACP (Analog Copy Protection) is worthless since higher quality digital rips are easily possible.

So, exactly how much have Fox and Paramount invested in a product that not only can't slow down piracy, but causes problems for some legitimate copies and players, making unrestricted pirate copies even more desirable than they are now?

Commercial content providers didn't just shoot themselves in the foot. They emptied the magazine and are reloading.

Preview

2.

What’s wrong with these guys?! Back in the day, there were lots of voices shouting the gospel of Hollywood's apocalypse by VHS or music by K7 . The piracy was huge back then and the law was much more permissible if not inexistent. Nobody died! The sales were high, the business was good. What about now?! Well, the business is 10 times better, the revenues and profits are much higher. The music is worse .. But they are greedy. They want MUCH more money. They are not talking about bankruptcy in the movies business and the music industry. They are only talking about the money they COULD have pocketed IF there would have been no piracy. Well piracy exists and I think that if you could borrow a book from your friend, you should be able the borrow a movie. If you could copy a book BY HAND just to distribute it , just because you like it and you want your people to read it (even 500 years ago) , you should be able to SEE a movie and listen to a song and IF you like it enough and respect the author's talent , you WILL buy it. How many time did you read a book borrowed from a friend and then, having made an extraordinary impression on yourself, you buy it to have it in your own library and to be able to read it any day and you would even buy and offer it as a gift to your friends. There would be another thesis about the fact that ONLY really good art (book, music or film) deserves to be sold for 10 ~ 20$ a piece and the less POPULAR (not less worthy) should sell for less than that. But now, it's something like a lottery: they're all priced the same when launched, but there's a HUGE difference between a Denzel Washington movie and a David Hasellhoff one ... Want to know how good it is? Then play the lottery , buy them both only to realize in the end that one is 100 times more valuable than the other and the other isn't even worth the time.

It's only greed, they have huge piles of money and they want more even if it's not worth it al the time. We should be allowed to weigh and decide.

YES, if there's a guy SELLING pirated content, making money over something it's not his, he should go to jail as this is theft.

But jailing the torrent sites that don’t make any money from the multimedia content shared !?!? That's crazy . And ... NO ... the money from the ADVERTISEMENTS on the torrent sites are not a direct consequence of the torrent contents but they are the reward for the site's administrators for the public information service they do by helping us evaluate the shared content.

Complicated ethics but some things are obvious :

1)The companies are only guided by greed;
2)The business is much better and the money are hundreds of times more;
3)But they obviously want more money for less work as in our days there's much less talent and much more playback involved;